Thoughts Swimmin' By Like Dolphins

...ever try to take pictures of dolphins from the beach? by the time ya hit the button, they’re gone...so, then, ya start pointing the camera in the general area where you saw them and start clicking, hoping one will appear, and maybe even jump, at just the right moment...which doesn’t usually work so well, either...but, at least you can end up with some nice shots of water...

...my car inspection’s due this week...and it’s gonna cost me a bundle...including the annual couple hundred bucks necessary to make the check engine light go off...only to come back on a week later, and stay on until I fork over another couple hundred dollars next year....I’m thinking about pointing out that I live in the eternal now...so the distinction between this year and last year doesn’t mean anything....somehow, though, I doubt ya can get an inspection sticker with now on it...

...a lotta people’ve been pissed off lately...and not just at town halls and the MTV Awards....I’m talkin’ about the mellow incense-scented environs of the yoga blogosphere, where fierce and sometimes hurtful arguments about corporate sponsorship, lascivious gurus, and the relative merits of divinity and solid abs seem to be poppin' up like poison ivy in a Zen garden....as an ongoing effort to be more compassionate and understanding, and hence less combative, is an essential part of my whole yoga practice thingy, I try to keep out of the fray...at least when the argument’s about yoga...though even that can sometimes be difficult as a one armed handstand...like, sometimes, people are so lacking in compassion and understanding I just feel like smackin’ ‘em upside the head...but I don’t...so that’s at least a start...

...I’ve been told there’s an equivalent to the Golden Rule in every major religious or ethical system...which attests to the fact that people in every society throughout history have needed to be reminded not to act like assholes...and, in the end, there’s really not much to do but keep trying...and try not to be to hard on yourself for not always acting like Gandhi...particularly since, as his biographers can attest, Gandhi didn’t always act like Gandhi, either...

After the Equinox

still life drifting past
the autumnal equinox,
and I just can’t deal

...got done what absolutely had to get done, put everything else off ‘til next week...whether that was wise or not...got in the car after dark and drove east...crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge a little after ten, getting to the ocean some time after midnight...all to wet toes in salt water before sleeping...

alone by the sea
except for that young couple
fucking in the sand

It Can Take a Long, Long Time

It’s so easy to slip, it’s so easy to fall
and let your memory drift and do nothing at all...
Lowell George

...life is more an art than a science.
Ganga White

reading yoga books
listening to Miles Davis
and sipping red wine

...have had a relatively steady daily meditation practice for the past few months...after many failed attempts over the years...and suspect my relative success this time is due, largely, to ignoring most of what I’ve read or been taught...for now simply working on the ability to sit still and resist temptations to go and do something else...

I practice compassion towards friends and enemies

but all these motherfuckers tryin’ to hate on my serenity...
Arj Barker

...and yet, somehow, even with all this meditation and yoga, everybody’s pissing me off lately...particularly myself...but everybody else, too...excluding, of course, people who read this blog...usually...and, of course, I’m far more bothered by people who don’t...who, clearly, have failed to study the ancient and revered Yoga Cynic Sutras sufficiently...particularly Sutra 53.657: Those who do not read the Yoga for Cynics blog* will endure one billion incarnations as dung beetles**...but that's really not my point...

...ancient wisdom (fake and otherwise) aside, pissed-offness doesn’t come from nowhere...and only festers when pushed back in...though tending to breed when let out in company...so it’s gotta be faced, and dealt with...which can take a long, long time...namaste for now...

* The use of the word blog in this sutra, millennia before the invention of the internet, has made interpretation quite difficult for scholars. Until recently, the term was usually loosely translated as harsh etchings on rocks.

** Various third, fourth, and fifth century commentaries (as well as a couple of sixth century commentaries, but they’re crap) point out that the billion incarnations refers only to those who fail to read the blog at all. Those who read it occasionally average far fewer dung beetle incarnations. Regular readers, of course, are rarely more than a post or two away from transcending form completely and becoming Floating Glowing Beings of Pure Love...

It'd Be a Lot Easier to Find Lost Glasses If You Could See Clearly

...it’d be a lot easier to find lost glasses if you could see clearly....that’s gotta be a perfect analogy for something...

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
William Blake

...bought an unlimited pass at a local yoga studio and ended up going to twenty-five classes in a month...concluding this past Saturday...which brought up a number of insights, including: that’s a helluva lotta yoga classes...

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are...
Ernest Hemingway

...Sunday morning biked sixty-five miles...pre-coffee...fifty of them as part of this Bike Philly thing...which I joined in support of some of the women-in-recovery I work with...though they did the more intelligent and mostly flat ten or twenty mile routes instead of the knee-breakingly hilly fifty...plus another fifteen or so getting there and back...which also involved a really big hill...bringing on thoughts like: that’s a helluva lotta biking...

...not that there's anything to complain about in any of this...'cause there really isn't...

How You React...

It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
Epictetus

...a long dry summer ending, finally...at Hemlock Lake, down a brutally steep, glacier-carved hill from the trailer I was officially living in for the summer, water was so low it created a beach you could walk along for miles, into areas you couldn’t normally get to easily...saw a bald eagle, maybe three or four miles in, resting on a branch maybe twenty feet above...

...actually for most of July and August lived an hour north of there, at a friend’s house in Rochester...matters professional, personal, and really really personal having unleashed something that had been bubbling underneath for a long time...leaving pristine isolation too frightening to deal with....then, the same could be said for life in general, but that wasn’t quite as easy to get away from...put the dissertation on hold, along with some bad habits, got into yoga for the first time, and that, along with therapy, and the wonders of modern psychopharmacology, seemed to help...but only so much...

...apparently was feeling better somewhat, enough to be back at the trailer that morning, if getting ready to head into town for a few days...had a writing center meeting that afternoon, a class to teach to medical students...Liquor, Drugs, and Literature...came up with the title and course content myself...and was looking forward to picking up a copy of the new Bob Dylan CD, Love and Theft, released that morning....phone rang as I was walking out the door...my mom...asked if I knew what was happening...which I didn’t...

...everything was cancelled, but I drove to town, anyway...spent the afternoon at a friend’s house...nursing a migraine, she kept watching the news, while another friend puked in the bathroom...I took her dog for a walk...it was just another day to him...got stopped by a T.V. crew...said I thought it was important to be absolutely sure who was responsible before talking about striking back at anybody...or something...never saw it, but a couple people who did told me they appreciated whatever I said....gotta admit, there was some comfort that day in knowing everybody else felt as fucked up inside as I did...

We begin where we are and how we are, and whatever happens, happens.
T.K.V. Desikachar

...was going to yoga classes with a guy named Francois Raoult...great teacher as long as you appreciated his sense of humor....was wondering, hoping he was gonna mellow us all out somehow...lull us into some cosmic mellow head space far removed from all that... tell us it was all ephemeral, and didn’t matter, anyway...and actually make us believe that...

...instead, he said something to the effect that there were, in fact, very legitimate reasons for the anxiety we were all feeling...but that didn’t mean we should let it paralyze us, or prevent us from functioning...

...and that was the key...no mystical la-la land to escape to...nothing to do but deal with exactly whatever it is was we had to deal with...

shanti shanti shanti

Early Morning Haiku

hammering next door

momentarily blocked out

by the garbage truck

It's All About Balance

...went to a wedding night before last and woke up yesterday morning more hungover than I’ve been in years...two parts 7-Up, two parts champagne, and a whole lotta Southern Comfort makes a helluva fruit punch...then back to yoga class in the evening...it’s all about balance...

...last wedding I went to was a little over a year ago...two hours and three lengthy dissertations on the proper godly nature of marriage...some people these days think they can redefine marriage, but you can’t redefine marriage, God decreed what marriage is...man on the top, woman—having blown her chance at self-determination in the Garden of Eden—meek and submissive on the bottom...guy behind me let out a deep MMHHH! of spiritual satisfaction every time his inherent mastery over womankind was extolled....and these, I thought, are my relatives...

...this time, just over the bridge from West Mt. Airy, State of Caffeinated Reverie, U.S.A., two young cousins of the bride determined who would read vows first by rock-paper-scissors...and, in a spirited mélange of Quaker meeting and Jewish ritual, journal reading and storytelling, nods to Chagall and classical ballet, and quite a bit of heartfelt creative anarchy, the deed was done....and this, I thought, is where I live now...

...for Sarah and Jason...long life & happiness...

Morning, September

We try to kill time but time ends up killing us.
Jack Fate (Bob Dylan)

...woke from a bad dream, started right off thinking nasty thoughts about myself, mumbled shit shit shit dragging myself out of bed...not the most auspicious start to the day...

...meditated with early Grateful Dead in the background, ate high fiber cereal, and checked e-mail...three comments on the new blog post, one of them spam...also checked the political news...don’t ask...

...headed out for coffee...September making itself known...needed more layers than I have in months...bright out, though...took some pictures of stray flowers growing out of people’s bushes...in two blocks saw two cop cars going by slowly...figured somebody was having a rougher morning than I...

...turned out it was a thief grabbing an i-phone off a woman’s table at the very coffee shop I was heading for...a friend, a marathon runner, was beating himself up for almost but not quite catching the guy, who leaped down a ten foot drop by the railroad tracks....personally, I’m inclined to think that apprehending a criminal with your bare hands is a far better idea on T.V. than in real life...where people get hurt...as such, things really didn’t end so badly...

Words, Words, Nothin' But Words...

Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject.
Michael Pollan

...a strange collection of self-defeating words, often expressed by students of writing, as well as some bloggers, is I’m not a writer...which is absurd...particularly if expressed in written form, or in reference to something one has written...since, by definition a writer=one who writes...

...and, contrary to popular romanticism, everybody has to work at it...

...T. S. Eliot told aspiring poet Stephen Spender I can understand you wanting to write poems but I don't quite know what you mean by 'being a poet'...because he knew the high-falutin’ identity of the poet was a conceit...kind of like being a yogi...

...you write poems or you don’t...you practice yoga or you don’t...though, of course, the ways in which we define poetry or yoga may vary widely...which is kinda true of words in general...

...have long been an expert bullshitter, enjoy trash-talking before, during, and after Scrabble games, and would rather tell an amusing tall tale than a boring but factually accurate account...and, in all honesty, believe there’s a meaningful difference between all of the above and dishonesty...

...Seeing Eye Chick...not her real name, but that’s okay...was kind and generous enough to pass on the Honest Weblog Award...which is greatly appreciated...even if it makes me feel a bit self-conscious...



...that Pretenders song starts such a drag to want something sometimes...which, I think, is about as honest as anything you’re likely to hear...might even say it encapsulates the first two of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths in seven short words...but I’m not even quoting the lyric correctly...the last word is actually sometime...no s...which doesn’t make sense...grammatically, at least...then, much of the time, neither does the truth...